A Natural Landscape

Consider what happens when we look at a landscape. Is there simply a natural perception of a natural object?

Well, no. Our English countryside is the complex product of centuries of labour and the way we view it is shaped by a weighty inheritance - think of the Arcadian myth, the Grand Tour, the Romantic poets, ideas of the Picturesque and the Sublime, the English Landscape tradition, the National Parks, etc.

Our countryside is often thought of as being natural - but think of the enclosures, crops, woodland, lanes, farms, pathways, standing stones etc. which give us the landscape with which we are familiar. Yet the tendency for all this to be seen as natural persists, while at the same time the working of the land is somehow invisible.

The way we view the landscape is, I believe, largely a result of the cultural inheritance of Graeco-Roman antiquity, handed down to us by way of eighteenth-century artists, poets and landscape gardeners. Their development of a spiritual-aesthetic image of the English countryside gave birth to a particular way of seeing it - as a nostalgic reminder of an Arcadian Golden Age, a refuge from the squalor of industrialization, a source of spiritual and moral refreshment and so on. The supposed natural quality is a vital element in all this, being equated with goodness, purity, virtue and health.